SearchMe.com

I was immediately attracted to this website because of the visuals. I first looked through each of the "stacks" that the website provided on the home page: Top News Stories, Entertainment News, Technology News, and Blog News. When thinking about my own classroom, I thought that I could use something like this for "current events" day on Fridays. I did "current events" in high school, but instead of looking for news stories online, we would use newspapers. We had to cut out the article and staple it onto our reflection paper. I think that if students went to this site to look for current events, they would have a much bigger range of news articles to pick from and can also choose the specific category that they're interested in-like technology, entertainment, blogs, etc. I think that I would limit their choices to Top News Stories and Technology News because these two are more educational than Entertainment News. I would encourage students to use the site for other purposes, but for their current events on Fridays, I would like them to share with the class something educational that they learned. I think that students would find this site a lot more useful than Google would be for current events. With Google, you have to actually have something in mind to search for. With SearchMe, there are already lots of news stories to choose from when you first open the page. There are also categories at the top that students can filter out their search such as video, images, music, etc. I was really impressed with this website overall and will continue to think of ways that it could be useful in the classroom (and to myself!). 

Podcasting

My podcast is all about professional development. I would use this idea as a teacher by asking other teachers or administration to subscribe to my episodes and give me feedback/advice on classroom management. My scenario was in my actual podcast, so I will place the script below: 

Hello my name is Alyssa. This is my first podcasting experience. I am a preservice teacher. I would love to work with kindergarten or first grade students. I want to get some practice with podcasting, so my episodes will be about Professional Development in the classroom. Par one will be a scenario about a group assignment in the classroom. I will pretend that something like this actually happened so that I can develop good classroom management. Ideally, this would be for other preservice teachers to listen to and give advice of what I can do better. Parents of my students could also listen to this to see what strategies I use and how I manage the classroom on a day-to-day basis. 

Here is a possible scenario: 

The students are working on a group assignment. I have them start out in groups of 4, thinking that they should be able to bounce a lot of ideas off of each other. I found that the students were too distracted and easily got off task. From here, I decided the next time to pari students in groups of 2. When I did this, I found that their ideas and creativity for a particular topic were limited because there were only 2 students working together. They would get done too soon also. When we had our last groups activity, I tried 3 students per group. This seemed to be the perfect number. Three people collaborated well together and bounced off different ideas. They also worked as a whole-not as individuals as the four-person group seemed to do earlier. So, at the end of the day, I found that first graders word best in groups of 3!

My podcast is on the following website:  http://www.podOmatic.com/media/details/1656934